Energy; Heat; Radioactivity and Einstein 11.14.11

Oops! I thought I had blogged our lesson last week and just saw I did not. :P
I think it was probably due to the fact that we had a field trip last Mon (our regular class day.)

Our 11.07.11 field trip to The Lawrence Hall of Science will be blogged by this weekend. I have been rendering and uploading the videos to get them ready for the blog.

We moved that weeks school day to Thurs and the day before that our son's little dog got torn up by the neighbor's Pitbull and Shepard. On Thurs the little guy was in surgery. Fri I drove out of town to visit my oldest son's son.... so..... I totally spaced on the lessons.

To play catch up:Last week BJ studied Energy; Heat; Radioactivity and O learned about Einstein.

This is one of Einsteins most famous photos. It shows his sense of humor. He liked it so much he bought several copies from the photographer. O laughed when he saw it. It made Einstein a little more human, I think.

There was only one experiment this week for the boys, but there was a lot of information to absorb.

BJ covered Fahrenheit and Celsius methods of measuring the temperature. James Joule, and kinetic energy (I had just bought a Newtons Cradle during our Mon. field trip the the Lawrence Hall of Science so it fit in nicely with today's lesson.) O and BJ frequently merged their lessons as I have planned them to be closely related. It works out great at times like this because O and BJ were able to experiment with kinetic energy and energy displacement while enjoying themselves with the Newtons cradle.



I really enjoy the Usborne quicklinks, but have learned to explore them before they do. Sometimes they are dead links, sometimes, like this week, they are only available in a particular country, sometimes they might be a link we have gone to before and sometimes they are not age appropriate. So I am really glad I checked this week as BJ had several listed in his studies to visit and only a few were viable.

Homeschooling is not a learning experience just for the children:)

I also subscribe to Enchanted Learning(an excellent resource for a variety curriculum materials), and through the school I have access to Brain Pop, Brain Pop Jr and the actual printed copy of the Sacramento Bee. ( I enjoyed this myself. It is like reading the newspaper, without the ink on your fingers : ) )

This week BJ studied Nuclear Power / Balance and O learned about Levers.
We started this week off with experiments first though. I had an Ein-o energy box so we completed the mechanical, elastic, wind and energy experiments.

 The first was an experiment with mechanical energy.

Using the shooter device the boys were able to make the flyer go. This resulted in some humorous antics. I posted one short video of them on my you tube channel; Earthsong54.

The boys also completed an elastic energy experiment.

The spool spun around using the wound up rubber band for an energy source.

There was also an experiment on wind energy. O made a pinwheel then demonstrated how it worked. I really liked the design he drew as well.

After we read "How to lift a Lion" O and I used the Ein-O Mech Science kit to construct examples of first, second and third class levers. O really seemed to enjoy that!

This is an example of a First Class lever:

 This is an example of a Second Class lever:

 This is an example of a Third Class lever:

While we were doing that BJ was having fun with Balancing things: first his body then things around the house then experiments in his Gizmos and Gadgets book. He made a balancing snake and a balancing parrot

 The parrot turned out so cute.